


The Stakes Have Never Been Higher

by scioscribe



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Detective Noir, Film Noir, Gen, Metafiction, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-19
Updated: 2013-03-19
Packaged: 2017-12-05 18:54:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/726749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“We’re going to be different,” Abed said.  “We’re going to be perfectly ordinary and have mainstream appeal across all demographics.”</p><p>“You sound like a daydream I had once,” Jeff said.  “Can we fight crime already?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Stakes Have Never Been Higher

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this before S4 started airing, and while I don't think there's anything here that directly contradicts anything we've seen so far in season four, it's best that you think of this as set a year after S3--and therefore post-graduation--rather than just immediately after the hypothetical fourth season end. Also, generic noir movie references abound, but two specific lines from _Chinatown_ are parodied as well. Also, massive continuity nods throughout.

“I’m not married to this trenchcoat,” Abed said as he examined the cuffs. “I thought it would make us look debonair, but instead we just look a little unnerving.”

“Yeah,” Troy said. “They don’t make you both weirdly attractive at all.”

“Just so we’re clear,” Jeff said, “I’m still not convinced this is a good idea.” Jeff put up a decent front of returning to his season one persona of aloof, sarcastic handsomeness, but he was still wearing a trenchcoat, even if it was Burberry and too stylish to be a genre stand-by. Also, when Abed had texted everyone and said, _Drop what you’re doing, we’re starting a private detective agency_ , Jeff had texted back _Do you even know the number of qualifications we would have to have for that?_

And Abed wrote back, _No, tell me_ , and Jeff, after seventeen minutes, did. He went to Google.

That was when Abed knew it was going to work.

Of course, it hadn’t worked entirely yet. He still just had Troy and Jeff.

“And by ‘I’m still not convinced,’” Jeff continued, “what I mean is that I’m not sure you didn’t drug me or hit me over the head with something heavy to get me here in the first place.”

Troy sighed. “If we promise to remember that you’re way too cool to be involved in this, will you stop mentioning it every five minutes?”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Abed said. “I’m going to add that to his employment contract.” He pulled up the file and started typing. Jeff and Troy’s employment contracts both consisted of lists of movies they weren’t allowed to suggest watching together, responsibilities (labeled as _legal/charming_ and _awesomeness_ , respectively), and stipulations like the above. Since the employment contracts had been Jeff’s idea in the first place, he couldn’t sulk about it without violating the hypocrisy clause.

Mouth contractually shut, Jeff folded his arms and admired the Burberry: there were no stipulations against vanity.

“How did you get us office space in Greendale anyway?” Troy said.

“The Dean agreed to rent it out at a discount, said he missed us. And he needed the money.”

“Is that legal?”

“Oh, it’s like _so_ legal,” Jeff drawled.

“We’re not in the business of law,” Abed said. “We’re in the business of justice. And maybe following around a few cheating spouses or dubious insurance claims, I don’t know, we don’t really have any clients yet.”

When they first graduated from Greendale, Abed had let everyone convince him that they’d stay in touch. It was easy: he wanted to be convinced. Then Shirley opened a new sandwich shop in an adjacent town and when she was in Greendale, she was there to see her family, until the drive got to her and they all moved one town over. Britta kissed him on the cheek and took a psychology internship studying the effects of marijuana on concentration but forgot to send him her new address, and one or two sporadic emails with embedded videos of her grinning and waving enthusiastically weren’t much consolation.

Pierce kept taking classes, found a new study group, broke up with them, found another. He still posted to his Twitter feed, but that was the most Abed had heard from him in months.

Until Jeff had responded to his text, Abed hadn’t talked to him in six weeks, either.

The last straw was a month before the private detective sequel-series idea dropped into his lap: Annie moved out of Casa Trobednie and went off to a master’s program in Denver. “We all have to grow up sometime,” she said nervously, right before she kissed him at the corner of his mouth and left behind the taste of bubblegum. “This is my time, right?”

Abed wanted the private detective format because it was more accessible. They’d been cancelled, that was the only explanation for why their collective friendship had splintered. There had been ways for them to all continue lives in Greendale, in regular if not continuous touch, but they hadn’t found them because the format wasn’t right.

“Crime shows are mainstream, though,” Abed said. “We’ll find clients. And Annie and Britta and Shirley and Pierce and will come back, because the format change will make us more popular.”

“Because quirky, character-driven crime shows always find an audience,” Jeff said. “That’s why I own all eleven seasons of _The Unusuals, Veronica Mars_ , and _Terriers_.”

“I’m still bummed about _Terriers_ ,” Troy said. “I really wanted to know if that was Britt’s baby or not.”

“We’re going to be different,” Abed said. “We’re going to be perfectly ordinary and have mainstream appeal across all demographics.”

“You sound like a daydream I had once,” Jeff said. “Can we fight crime already?”

“I was really thinking they’d come,” Abed said. He kept looking at the door even after he didn’t want to anymore. He’d paid extra for it to say Greendale Seven Investigations, but they weren’t the Greendale Seven yet, just three guys in trenchcoats talking about cancelled television shows. “Britta and Pierce didn’t even respond to the text message, and Annie and Shirley just asked if I was feeling okay. I thought we would—” He was stuck on the sentence, the way he would pretend to be sometimes ( _It’s a mixer, we didn’t know how to reach you_ ), and Troy got it somehow and reached over to grab his shoulder.

“Okay,” Troy said, “so that’s our first case. The case of the missing women—and Pierce.”

“Actually, I’m here,” Pierce said. He rapped on the outside of the door. “You locked it, morons.”

“Okay, before we open that,” Jeff said, “I really think we should consider the advantages of our current situation.”

They did, but opened the door anyway (although not without a prickle of unease). Abed approved of Pierce’s trenchcoat. “We’re going to—”

“Track down the girls, I know. I could hear you through the door.”

“Pierce,” Jeff said. “Why didn’t you respond to Abed’s text message?”

“Because I can’t think of anything more ridiculous than a private detective agency based in a community college and led by seven people with now law enforcement experience, whose only qualification is that they used to be a study group, and now Abed’s lonely.”

Every now and then, Piece would pull himself back from whatever cusp of dementia he was at that week and manage eloquence: it made Abed suspicious of all the times he didn’t bother. He tilted his head. “So why come now?”

“Because I’m lonely too, dumbass,” Pierce said. “Better question: why is Jeff here?”

“I’m cultivating an aura of mystery,” Jeff said, thumbs splayed idly across his phone keyboard in the way that meant that he would start texting just as soon as they lost his minimum level of interest, which would be in three, two, one—

“Plus no one would hire him since that Alan guy badmouthed him all over town,” Troy said. “And he didn’t want to move.”

“I have very expensive plants.”

“ _Lonely_ ,” Pierce said, and pointed. “Ha.”

“Oh, shut up,” Jeff said, and started texting what Abed was pretty sure were nonsense syllables. Every now and then, he actually got one of Jeff’s pretend-texts, and it was all AutoCorrect fixes of mistyped words from random keyboard presses. He didn’t know if anyone else ever got them or not, because he kept them to himself, like he’d kept the story of the pretty little Indian girl. “So are we on the case or not?”

“From our slightly illegal residence in a publically funded institution, to our dubious investigation skills, to our devilish alliance with a compromised authority figure, we fit all early qualifications for the beginning of noir. And, given the absence of women, a crime procedural. We move towards noir by acquiring Annie, Shirley, and Britta, who all have femme fatale elements, and I’d rather be noir as long as we can keep other elements traditional. No voiceovers.”

“So,” Jeff said, “that’s a yes, then?”

“It’s a yes,” Troy said. He was smiling. Abed knew opinions on subjective issues varied wildly, but he thought Troy had the best smile of anyone in the group. “Okay: crime-fighting starts _now_!”

Several minutes passed.

Pierce said, “Does anyone actually know how to fight crime?”

“I’ve seen a lot of _Law and Order_ reruns,” Abed said. “But no. It’s okay. I’m pretty sure most crime procedurals don’t know how to actually fight crime. And I do know how to find people, because it’s the twenty-first century and most people are reachable via a variety of technologies, unless they’re deliberately trying to avoid you.”

They all spent a few minutes texting, tweeting, Facebook-messaging, and even, as a last resort, calling Britta, Shirley, and Annie.

“So they’re deliberately trying to avoid us,” Jeff said an hour later. “Damn, if I’d known that before, I would have just sent out a message saying Abed was dying. Now they won’t fall for it. And see, Britta’s not here to tell me that would be morally despicable.”

Troy stared at him, openmouthed. “That would be morally despicable.”

“Flattering, Troy. But it doesn’t—and I never thought I’d say this—compensate for the lack of Britta.”

“It’s true,” Abed said. “We’re going to be too happy and freewheeling without her, and too rudderless without Annie, and we’ll descend into petty infighting without the slightly defective moral compass that is Shirley. I know how all the permutations work.”

“And without _Abed_ , we—” Jeff started, but Troy kicked him in the shin.

“Without me, we wouldn’t have a private detective agency,” Abed said. “Or a case.”

Troy whipped a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket. “And without a case, we wouldn’t—”

“Sorry,” Abed said. “I edited the contracts last minute to prevent any references to _CSI Miami_. Just to be safe, I don’t even think we should have the sunglasses around.”

“What if it’s bright outside?”

“Sacrifices have to be made,” Abed said. “We’re trying to ensure quality here.”

*

They decided to track Shirley down first, since they already knew where she was and it was getting to be lunchtime anyway and after checking out the Greendale cafeteria special of the day, everyone decided that it would take an hour long drive to make them feel like eating again.

“There were quotation marks around the words ‘hot dogs,’” Jeff said. “Not to mention the ‘mustard.’”

No one could agree on music for the drive, though, so they ended up playing Abed’s _Inspector Spacetime_ audio-play, the ones with the Eighth Inspector and Fitzwilliam Fort.

“I don’t get it,” Pierce said. “Why are they trying to disarm the intergalactic bomb when they don’t even have the cosmic spanner?”

“Because they don’t give up even when all the circumstances in the universe are allied against them,” Abed said quietly.

When they got to Shirley’s Sandwiches, Jeff parked and said, “You know, someone should stay here and keep the car running. In case of—danger.”

“He wants to hear the end,” Abed said to Troy.

It wasn’t a great ending, actually: Fitzwilliam Fort discovered that the secret to disarming the bomb was a key the Inspector had given him in the fourth audio-play, when he’d briefly crossed over from a future part of his own timeline. The key was a motel room swipe card that had probably been the Inspector trying to hit on Fitzwilliam. The audio-plays were pretty homoerotic like that. But the point was always having what you needed, even when what you had didn’t look like anything special. Not without meaning, but still a little trite. Still, Abed could be grateful that they at least remembered their continuity enough to tie things together and enough emotional pull to plaster over a lack of thematic originality.

“He wants to know if Fort and the Inspector ever do the horizontal tango,” Pierce said, unbuckling his seatbelt.

“Yes, kind of, and will all of you please stop talking? Go get Shirley.”

Shirley’s Sandwiches was in a strip mall between a store that sold knitting supplies and a store that sold firearms, so she probably got a wide variety of customers. Abed passed two bikers and an old woman with a beehive hairdo, although given the crocheted scarves in the motorcycle jacket colors, he was reluctant to jump to conclusions about where any of them had been spending their time. Troy looked enviously at the skeins of wool in the knitting shop window, like the heather and pink displays and the powder blue yarn balls were newborn kittens.

“Later,” Abed said.

“I need some more red for your Fourth Inspector scarf.”

“Girls knit,” Pierce said smugly.

“Yeah,” Troy said, “and we’re driving all over town to get our girls back, so I’m guessing girls are pretty cool, actually.”

“ _Britta_ knits,” Pierce said.

Troy looked down. “Oh.”

“But so do lots of people,” Abed said hastily, since he wanted his scarf. He opened the door to Shirley’s Sandwiches and hoped the smell of fresh-baked bread and fresh-baked brownies would distract everyone. “We have to remember to bring Jeff back a sandwich.”

But as soon as he saw Shirley, he forgot about being hungry. Shirley had the quality of being reassuring even when she was frazzled or enraged, and she always smelled delicious: sometimes when Abed tried to remember his mother, he remembered Shirley instead, and sometimes that was better. Shirley had been there every Christmas since he’d met her.

“Boys,” she said.

Abed wasn’t an expert in smiles outside of Troy’s, but he thought that Shirley’s didn’t quite reach her eyes: the sides of them didn’t crinkle the way they usually did. Even when they hugged, her arms were loose around him.

He stepped back and tilted his head. “We were trying to get in touch with you.”

“Well, you know how it is with a business,” she said. “Busy, busy, busy.”

“It’s true,” Pierce said. “When I was running Hawthorne Wipes, we—”

“Pierce, we don’t have time for your made-up reminisce right now,” Troy said. “Shirley’s brooding. And brooding’s bad.”

Batman brooded, but Batman was a cultural touchstone whose persistent unhappiness and melancholy was part of his appeal. Abed didn’t need Shirley to have appeal, he just wanted her to be happy. “We can talk about this in your office,” he said. “We wore the trenchcoats for genre convention, but outside of the office, I think they’re mostly making us look like flashers. Oh, and Jeff’s in the car. We cracked the windows.”

They all filed into Shirley’s office and let her close the door. The trenchcoats started to gain relevance again. Abed took out a cigarette to use as a prop, but didn’t light it: restaurant codes on smoking were strict, and it wouldn’t help his cause to get thrown out of Shirley’s restaurant.

He tried to think of something appropriately noir. “What’s a smart dame like you doing in a place like this? When you should be at Greendale. With us.” That was wrong. Noir detectives never gave into desperation so early in the game, but noir detectives also didn’t have surrogate mothers working in sandwich shops while their surrogate fathers waited in the car to hear the end of British science fiction radio-plays. He had to try harder. If they couldn’t get at least a little more conventional, they’d never get renewed. They wouldn’t even get their full cast back.

Troy edged forward. “He means that we’ve been looking all over town for you. There’s unfinished business. Scores, that need settling. And—things of that nature.”

That was better.

“Why the hell don’t you answer your text messages?” Pierce asked.

That was worse, but workable: noir was dark. Inappropriate anger could go a long way if properly contained. Abed chewed on his cigarette until he started to taste the tobacco. He spat it out into the trash and got a candy cigarette from Troy instead. Staying relevant was all about adapting tropes for the modern age.

He let the sugar dissolve on his tongue and tried to get into character. “You can tighten that twist-tie all you want, Shirley, but sooner or later, you’re going to spill the beans.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Do people keep beans in bags with twist-ties?”

“It’s possible. I don’t cook a lot. You do, always have, hence the business. But like my partner said, we have unfinished business, and you’d better watch the stove, because it’s about to boil over.”

“Maybe a little much on the food metaphors,” Troy said quietly.

“I thought I was your partner!” Pierce said.

“Listen,” Shirley said, her voice dropping an octave lower, her eyes crinkled seriously at the edges now, but not with smiling. It was the same voice she’d used when talking about how the Rapture would end with them all being chain-sawed to bits: Abed had categorized it as “inappropriate glee, unconnected to glee club.” Things were getting interesting.

“You don’t want to be poking around this,” she continued. “There are things going on here that are bigger than all of us.”

Troy’s voice hiked up in pitch to compensate for Shirley’s newfound gravel: “A _giant sandwich_? _A Guinness Book of World Records sandwich_?”

“Bigger than that,” Shirley said. “Bigger than Greendale. That’s just where it starts. Why do you think we all had to get out?”

“You graduated,” Pierce said. “And I didn’t get out. Tuition’s bargain basement cheap, two-for-one on cultural studies classes. The professor said my impersonations were now forty percent less offensive.”

Shirley’s scowl quivered slightly. “How—how ‘bout that. But you’re missing the obvious, boys. Who did they have to get out of the way?”

“The graduating class?” Abed said. He didn’t bother asking about the nefarious They: that was genre appropriate. Part of being a character of a mainstream hit was never asking the obvious question that might reduce the tasteful amount of ambiguity. Anyway, he was sure Shirley wouldn’t answer. “Or just us? Just the study group?”

“We can’t talk here,” Shirley said, looking out her office window at the restaurant full of people who seemed to be busy eating sandwiches and ignoring them, exactly like people would if they were attempting covert surveillance. “We need to go underground.”

“Jeff will hate that,” Troy said. “No cell signal.”

“Not literally underground,” Shirley said. “Just the next best thing.” She whipped off her apron and gathered up her purse, decisive as a knight putting on armor: it was always in times like this that Abed wished Shirley would cosplay as the Inspector sometimes. “She’s gone off the grid, Abed, she’s in the dark, the girl’s living off Cheetos and conspiracy theory websites. She saw it before any of us—tried to tell me, Lord love her. But she went in too deep, started seeing connections everywhere—I think even they’re too scared to go near her.”

“Mm,” Troy said. “Sounds dramatic.”

“Cheetos and conspiracy theories,” Abed said. “Sounds like Britta.”

“She goes by Unfiltered now,” Shirley said.

They forgot all their sandwiches. They were on the case.

*

Britta had moved into Annie’s old apartment above Dildopolis, which made Jeff angry for some reason: he kept shoving his thumbs into the buttons on his phone so hard they started to sound like they were going to crack. Abed pulled him aside as they were walking in. Troy and Shirley knew the genre rules enough to compensate for the absence of Piece, so Abed had time to deal with Jeff before he became a characterization liability. Noir men were supposed to be jagged, not splintering, and he needed Jeff to be able to walk that line.

“You’re upset,” Abed said.

“You’re breaking character.”

“Only because you did first. And the camera would follow them anyway, so we’re off-screen.”

“And now you’re breaking the fourth wall,” Jeff said, but he put his phone away. “Abed, you know we’re not actually on a television show, right? I mean, after the Claymation thing, I just feel the need to clarify that every now and then.”

“It wasn’t Claymation. And I know what reality is, Jeff. We’re talking about you. Britta having this apartment makes you uncomfortable.”

Jeff shrugged. “We already had to deal with Annie living in this one-step-up-from-the-projects and one-literal-level-above-an-overpriced-sex-shop, see-it-on-the-nightly-news shithole of an apartment. I don’t want it for Britta, too. If she needed a place to stay, she could have—” He shrugged again. “And if she really is cooped up there making Spare Change videos and calling herself Unfiltered, she needed us.”

“You don’t want to think that you didn’t know,” Abed said.

Jeff pulled out his phone again and stared at it. “I always knew with you.”

“Because I imagine Christmas wonderlands. Kind of obvious. But if it makes you feel any better, I didn’t know either, and I always knew with you, too.”

“Well, you’re not the only one with showy mental breakdowns, so don’t give yourself too much credit.” He put the phone away again and smoothed down the edges of his trenchcoat. “Come on. Let’s go see how Crazy Britta is different from Regular Britta.”

Abed followed.

What he’d told Jeff about reality was true and always had been: it was a conversation they’d had before and would be one they would have again, probably, if Jeff stayed. Abed could put up with repeating himself for a good cause. What he hadn’t said was that there was a good reason to preferring even the most trite of genre conventions to reality. In reality, when people graduated college, even community college, they drifted and lost touch: close friendships became occasional phone calls became Facebook updates, and sooner or later, in reality, he would think about all of them mostly in the past tense. Reality was unacceptable.

In television, people maintained connections long after they were remotely plausible. Television had been the only thing to teach Abed that love could last a lifetime, or at least until cancellation.

But he wasn’t going to get renewal hanging back in the shadows doing meta-commentary on the nature of serialization. He walked up the stairs to Britta’s apartment. It smelled like dryer lint and freezer-burnt Popsicles and sounded like someone playing a recording of Greendale’s school song backwards.

“Do you hear it?” was the first thing Britta demanded of him as he came in the door. She was wearing a Greendale school sweatshirt that had a lot of stains on it that Abed decided not to think about, and she’d experimented with a perm since graduation. It hadn’t done anything to restore the perm’s reputation. “Abed, you have to hear it.”

“Hi, Britta.”

“Dame,” Troy said. “Dame Britta.”

“She’s not Judi Dench,” Jeff snapped from over by the fridge. “Britta, you’ve got like a family size Cool Whip in here and a can of that shredded Parmesan.”

“I order in a lot,” Britta said. “Do you even know how to work your stove?”

“No, but I keep a reasonable cross-section of Whole Foods in my kitchen out of good taste alone.” He closed the door. “Also, and I know you’re obviously in the later stages of insanity, but none of us have eaten lunch yet.”

“Pizza menu in the drawer by the microwave,” she said.

“Pizza menu and two dead spiders. Charming.”

“Dammit, Winger, I’m trying to unravel a conspiracy here.” She turned all her attention back to Abed. “Do you hear it, Abed? Tell me you hear it.”

“The sound of a cuckoo clock,” Pierce said. “That’s all we’re hearing.”

“Be gentle with her,” Shirley said. “The girl’s been through the wars. We all have.”

“I missed the wars,” Troy said, looking at the floor.

Abed said, “Wars are overrated,” and stepped closer to the stereo. It looked like it was from the nineties, given the amount of colored plastic worked into the structure. “Greendale’s school song backwards.”

“And do you hear what it’s _saying_?”

“The lyrics. Backwards.”

“And if you listen to them while holding your head _underwater_ ,” Britta said, eyes glittering, “they’re saying _SHE WILL DESTROY_.”

Jeff said, “Hang on a minute,” to the pizza place he had on the phone, and said, “Why would you listen to them with your head underwater?”

“What, like you’ve never fallen asleep in the bathtub before?”

Troy nodded. “Pretending I was a merman. It was pretty cool until it turned out that I could not breathe underwater.”

 _Reality again_ , Abed thought. If it were up to him, Troy could be a merman, as long as it wasn’t permanent: if Troy had to live underwater, Abed would be lonely, especially since he lived in a landlocked state and didn’t like to travel.

“—and a medium with olives. Yeah, I know it’s weird.”

“You remembered,” Britta said.

“That’s not the kind of pizza order anyone forgets,” Troy said. “Olives are, like, the accidental part of a supreme pizza that you just eat because it would take too long to pick them off.”

“It’ll be here in ten minutes,” Jeff said. “And he didn’t need directions. He got the address and said, and I quote, ‘oh, above Dildopolis.’”

“Yeah,” Britta said, “you’re right, Jeff, more people really _should_ be ashamed of their sexuality.”

“Guys,” Troy said. “Wait, I mean dames. And—fellows?”

“There aren’t as many vaguely derisive ways of addressing men,” Abed said. “I say we ad-lib.”

“Dames and fellows,” Troy said, more confidently now, “this isn’t the time to bicker. Britta’s right. We’re unraveling a conspiracy here, and it goes all the way to—wherever it happens to go. I don’t really understand what’s going on yet. But I think we should start with who ‘she’ is and what she’s going to destroy, and why someone would bother embedding that in song lyrics that you could only hear backwards and underwater.”

“Hey,” Pierce said, “I wrote that song, and I didn’t put any of that eighties Satanic crap in it.”

“First of all,” Jeff said, “Bruce Hornby and the Range would beg to differ that you wrote that song. Secondly, what you have right is that this is all crap. I don’t know how, but I have the distinct sense that we’re all being played by someone who has too much time on their hands and too many DVDs of _Chinatown_.”

“Wait,” Troy said, “Britta’s Pierce’s sister and his daughter?”

“Jeff’s right,” Abed said. “Things are lining up too neatly. Shirley, the successful business owner with the dark connections to the underworld, the one who got out alive, but keeps herself alive by covering up all knowledge. Britta, the blogger, the neo-conspiracy nut with half a stick of butter in her fridge.”

“Half a stick of butter would have been comparatively normal,” Jeff said. “And I’ve seen her fridge before, this isn’t that far out of the ordinary.”

“The perm,” Abed said.

Britta touched it. “You guys don’t like it?”

Troy evaluated: “It looks like someone put a poodle in an electric socket.”

“Duh- _doy_ ,” she said in a trembling voice. “That’s what I was going for.”

“Oh, honey,” Shirley said, “I know people who can fix that, okay?”

Britta nodded frantically.

“And even aside from hair-related and sartorial business,” Abed went on, “it’s too neat. I never expected us to match up this well. Jeff can’t get the right type of trenchcoat with two weeks to shop for it, but Britta and Shirley are note-perfect. Britta a little too much, maybe.”

“I _told_ you Method acting was a bad idea,” Shirley said to her. “You leave that Hollywood voodoo to Daniel Day-Lewis, he knows how to handle it. All you had to do was learn your lines.”

“It’s scripted,” Abed said. “And it’s absurdist. Pierce inadvertently buried a message in his own lyrics? It’s Michael Douglas’s _The Game_ turned up to eleven. It’s—” He turned to Troy and suddenly felt like he couldn’t breathe from the way his heart had suddenly pushed its way up into his throat. He reached out and let Troy grab his hands. “There’s only one person in town who could have coordinated all of this, pulled all of these strings, masterminded the game from the beginning. Someone who solves all her problems with chloroform and elaborate lies. Someone who staged a break-in to cover a broken DVD. Someone who made sure to write down everyone’s contact information. It’s all been a decoy, Troy, a ruse.”

Troy’s hands tightened. “You mean—”

“It always,” Abed said, “comes down to the femme fatale.”

The doorbell rang.

“Oh,” Britta said, “pizza’s here. Kind of anticlimactic, but does anyone mind if we eat first?”

“No,” Abed said, “that’s cool.”

*

They found her back at Greendale, in the Dean’s office.

“I rented the leather chair. His regular one is just so undramatic,” Annie said after spinning around while doing a slow-clap, making Jeff roll his eyes. “Or should I say something like—so we meet at last, Mr. Nadir?”

“I should have known I’d find you here,” Abed said, offering her a candy cigarette.

“You mean what’s a dame like me doing in a place like this?” She slid up from the chair. Unlike Jeff, she knew how to dress for noir, and had made the most of legs and an early twentieth-century wardrobe.

“I used that line already.”

Annie went on seamlessly. “Of course, there are no dames like me, Abed. You should have remembered that.” A crunch of the candy cigarette still delicately balanced between her teeth. “I’ve taken people down before to keep us all together, you should have known that taking control would be as easy as taking candy cigarettes from a baby.”

“Who would give candy cigarettes to a baby?” Shirley said.

Pierce chuckled. “Babies smoking. Hilarious.”

“Holy crap,” Jeff said. “You stayed incommunicado for months just to make a _noir homage_ work? That’s such extraordinary artistic _batshit insanity_. Britta was living above Dildopolis!”

“The rent was really reasonable,” Britta said. “And I got a discount on—something totally normal. NBD.”

“Abed was having a nervous breakdown, and Pierce is here! I bought a trenchcoat! What the hell is wrong with you people? What’s wrong with _this_ scenario?” He picked up an imaginary phone. “Hi, Abed, it’s Jeff. Want to get lunch and reminisce about how we used to go to a college for people who were completely divorced from reality? Great, me too. See you there! No, not that Denny’s, the other one. Because it’s _got cleaner bathrooms, that’s why_!”

“That was detailed,” Annie said. “And I didn’t plan it for months, Jeff. I didn’t plan anything for months except for staring a life without the six of you.”

Abed hadn’t counted on that. He edged closer to Troy and let the cuffs of their trenchcoats brush together, for reassurance.

“I told myself: forget it, Annie, it’s Greendale. You can move on. But I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to move on _to_ without the people I wanted to move on _with_ —so I left my master’s program when Abed asked us all about the private detective agency.”

“Annie,” Shirley said. “You didn’t have to do that. I can keep up my business and this one, I’m sure you can go to school—”

“In Denver, Shirley?” She finished off the last bite of her candy cigarette. “That’s dirty pool, and you know it, Ms. Bennett, and dames like me don’t play that game, never have.” But Abed had watched enough noir to know that the femme fatale always broke at the last minute when the hero confronted her, so he knew exactly when to watch the last of Annie’s well-rehearsed characterization escape her. Then she just looked like their Annie again: thrumming with energy and questionable ethics, iron-clad morality, overachievement, and caffeine. “It doesn’t matter what you’re good at. I’m good at you guys. And I think we could be good at fighting crime. But we have to do it right, which is why I had to stage this. Well, aside from it being fun—”

“You could script some of my movies sometime,” Abed said. “If you wanted.”

She preened. “Really?”

“Sure. I mean, there were some logical inconsistencies, but the plot moved at a pretty fast clip, and you have a good sense of tropes.”

“Aw, _Abed_ —but what I really had to know was when to break them. I had to do noir that was so note-perfect you’d know it was wrong, because life isn’t like that. _Our_ life isn’t like that. You said you wanted us mainstream, like there was only one way we could act that would work, and I can’t—I did that in high school, Abed, and sometimes I even did at Greendale. I don’t want to do it now. And I don’t think any of us should.”

“Edison speeches are the new Wingers,” Abed said to Troy as Jeff tried not to look offended.

“I don’t want to have to dress like this just to fight crime while you all get to wear suits,” she said. “And Britta was _really_ good at her part, so maybe when we act like she’s the worst for the easy joke, we forget the part of her that makes us love her. And Shirley keeps her business, because we’re not more important than the rest of her life. And Jeff can wear that trenchcoat if he wants to, and Troy can have candy cigarettes, and Pierce can—Pierce, what do you want to do? That you couldn’t do if this were straightforward noir?”

“Stay,” Pierce said. “Mostly. I don’t know about this whole homage thing you all have going on, but I was just a little—without everyone—you know.”

“And Pierce can stay,” Annie said, smiling. She wasn’t wearing dark enough lipstick, he noticed now, to really be a noir heroine. “And Abed, just because people drift apart doesn’t mean they won’t come back together again, and just because we’re still in reality doesn’t mean we won’t keep renewing ourselves. I think we should fight crime. I just don’t think we should fight ourselves. If the format’s not big enough for us, we’ll make it bigger.”

“Or go on Netflix Instant,” Abed said. “Like _Arrested Development_.”

“I have no idea how _that’s_ what you’re taking away from this,” Jeff said.

“I’m taking other stuff, too,” Abed said. “I guess we can be what we want. The trenchcoat isn’t that bad.”

“It’s not good,” Troy said.

“Jealous,” Jeff said.

“And I think we solved our first case,” Abed said. “Which means that Greendale Seven Investigations is officially open for business. And the pilot of the revamp’s over.”

“What kind of plane are we talking about?” Pierce said.

*

“One thing about this is still bugging me,” Troy said when they were all back in their office, crowded in so tightly that Abed could smell the lack of laundry Britta had done when she’d been living as Unfiltered and Jeff’s expensive cologne, the kind of that just smelled like platinum.

“Only _one_ thing about this bothers you?” Jeff said, but his face was relaxed, he wasn’t texting, and he was eating Shirley’s brownies without dividing them into sixths first. Abed figured they would be okay.

And Troy was smiling. If he ever did become a merman, Abed could relocate. They’d already proven the format was flexible, so location was probably a secondary concern. And he felt less afraid of flying right now than he ever had before.

“Yeah,” Troy said. “I understand why Britta had to start two separate blogs about how Greendale was run by drug cartels and I understand why Shirley ditched her business in the middle of the day to run through an over-the-top noir script and I understand why Annie masterminded everything to teach us all a lesson about—okay, maybe I don’t understand that part.”

“Being ourselves,” Abed said. “It was a little special episode-y.”

“But I don’t get why weren’t included,” Troy said, aiming that at Annie now. “If you were only trying to get to Abed.”

“Oh,” Britta said, “she thought Jeff would think it was stupid.”

“That is just _dead on_.”

“And,” Shirley said, “Pierce is, well, Pierce.”

“A given,” Abed said.

“And,” Annie said, with a slight sideways look, “you can’t keep a secret from Abed, Troy.”

“Yeah,” Britta said, “we all found that out the hard way on Christmas.”

“Okay, for the last time, I’m not supposed to be doing Secret Santa anyway, and you’ll all thank me when you don’t just get socks with tiny reindeer on them!”

“Noir always has a femme fatale,” Abed said. “We had three.”

“Noir also always has a downer ending,” Jeff said.

“We can break with convention,” Abed said. “Annie’s proven that already. And we have to have the serialization hook, anyway. Which reminds me: the Dean says someone’s stolen his best pearl necklace. We’re on the case. Time is money, people. Except we’re not getting paid this time.”

“Compelling,” Jeff said dryly, but he finished his brownie and stood up.

“Crime procedural?” Abed said. “Crime procedural? Crime procedural? And—camera freeze on the logo on the door as it closes behind us. Okay, people, that’s a wrap. Six seasons and a movie.”


End file.
